“America’s heritage is kleptocracy…”

“I’m not the president of black America,” Barack Obama has said. “I’m the president of the United States of America.”

Precisely. And the President of the United States is not just an enactor of policy for today, he is the titular representative of his country’s heritage and legacy. In regards to black people, America’s heritage is kleptocracy–the stealing and selling of other people’s children, the robbery of their fruits of black labor, the pillaging of black property, the taxing of black citizens for schools they can not attend, the taxing of black citizens for pools that will not have them, the taxing of black citizens for police who do not protect them, the marking of whole communities as beyond the protection of the state and thus subject to the purview of outlaws and predators.

The bearer of this unfortunate heritage feebly urging “positive habits and behavior” while his country imprisons some ungodly number of black men, may well be greeted with applause in some quarters. It must never be so among those of us whose love of James Baldwin is true, whose love of Ida B. Wells is true, whose love of Harriet Tubman, and our ancestors who fought for the right of family, is true. In the fight to preserve the black family, America has rarely been an ally. Very often it has been an enemy.

–Black Pathology And The Closing Of The Progressive Mind by Ta-Nehisi Coates.